The “Blue Card” procedure at the base of prevention of domestic violence in opinion of social workers and police officers

Abstract

Objectives The “Blue Card” procedure is an important part of the system of preventing domestic violence. The main purpose of this procedure is protection of victims and eliminate the violence. Intervention in families affected by violence is undertaken by local interdisciplinary teams and working groups, consisting of representatives of various institutions. That model of intervention has been in operation since 2010 and has been both extolled and criticized. The aim of this article is to show, how the “Blue Card” procedure is evaluated by practitioners, i.e. police officers and social workers. These institutions take the main “burden” of intervening in families with violence. Material and methods The research method was expert opinion survey. Results The research was carried out in the Podkarpackie Voivodship. Studies have shown that experts (police officers and social workers) negatively assessed the "Blue Card" and its possibilities of preventing of domestic violence. Conclusions In their opinion, the weakness of this system is an excessive bureaucratisation of the procedure, low involvement into the interdisciplinary cooperation of other local institutions and the lack of effective "tools" to influence on perpetrators of domestic violence.

Keywords

• police officers
• social workers
• domestic violence
• “blue card” procedure
• domestic violence prevention